


Dreams and Lovers

by fluorescentgrey



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Era, Canon-Typical Shower Scenes, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Post-Canon, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:35:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27692222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: "Doesn't it feel like we've been here before?"
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 26
Kudos: 89





	Dreams and Lovers

It was so late, or otherwise it was so early, that only dreams and lovers were awake. Hawkeye wasn't sure whether he was both or neither, only that he’d laid down and shut his eyes at eleven-thirty after what he thought he remembered qualified as a respectable quantity of martinis for the average person not in the theater of war, and then all he could do was lie there while his heartbeat shook the cot. And shook, and shook. The cot like a boat on the stormy sea. The funny thing about being afraid all the time was that it was usually a kind of steady throb, like the hum some people said they could hear in Taos or Detroit, so that eventually you almost stopped noticing it even though it always had you feeling like you were toeing the edge of a knife… but then sometimes it would spike like an arrhythmic palpitation. Then you were at the mercy of the fear and there was nothing to be done. It would wash over you like a fever as long as you let it, which was usually until something else happened to distract you. Which on this occasion happened to be B.J. across the tent getting up out of bed, grabbing some things, identifying a coat on the floor that may or may not have been his, and sneaking out the door.

Frank wasn’t back from post-op yet, so there was no good reason for it. The curiosity got the better of the fear. It tended to do that; that was why it’d killed the cat. Hawkeye got up and into his robe and coat and boots, knees cracking, three toes numb. His mouth tasted like fermented army toothpaste and he could taste his heartbeat near the back of his throat. It was still going like crazy. At first when it happened he would lie there and try to mentally enumerate, what are you so afraid of? Death, obviously. Pain, obviously. Capture, torture, obviously, there being many different kinds of torture and many different damning things one might say in such a scenario. But even as it was always possible, it never happened. Sometimes you got to thinking, maybe worrying about it is what keeps it from happening… but if it’s the kind of worry that you can feel taking years off your life, is it worth it? Who knows? Those were the kinds of questions that would make even Sidney Freedman sit back in his folding chair, holding his cards to his chest, and just nod his head contemplatively, digesting.

Outside it was frigid cold. Hawkeye’s empty stomach was making a terrible noise that might’ve summoned any sniper currently in a twenty mile radius. B.J. had disappeared amidst the maze of the compound, but then Hawkeye heard the unmistakable slamming sound of the shower tent door.

B.J. had already claimed his own little cubicle and was setting about filling the stale, bitter air with steam like this was the Russian baths on East Tenth Street. “Sorry,” he said when he saw Hawkeye in the door. “Did I wake you?”

“I wasn’t sleeping.”

“Me neither.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Hawkeye asked as he got undressed, even though he already knew what the answer would be.

“Not particularly.”

Hawkeye figured he could safely conclude it was something about the wife and child situation that B.J. 1) figured Hawkeye couldn’t understand in order to obfuscate the fact that he 2) could hardly himself understand. This was typical. “Frank’s still in post-op,” Hawkeye said, getting into the free cubicle and pulling the shower chain. He was moved by a shock of heart-stopping cold before it evened out to the customary lukewarm. “We could put mud in his bed.”

“Not tonight,” said B.J. Now this was somewhat worrying. “Besides, even the mud in this camp is frozen.”

God damn, Hawkeye felt like saying, you know you can tell me what’s eating you. Don’t you? But he supposed if the shoe was on the other foot he too would be withholding. He couldn’t rightly say, it’s you that’s eating me. It’s your perfection and that I could never have you right but only just enough that’s eating me alive. “Maybe some other time,” he said instead.

“It’s a date.”

They went about the necessary vague gestures toward the business of bathing before the warmth melted some of the ice away.

“Hawk,” B.J. said eventually. His voice was soft enough to barely be heard over the sound of the water. There was a curious edge in it that told Hawkeye before this his bunk had been shaking too.

“What is it?”

“This’ll sound crazy.”

“It won’t.”

“It’s only because I can’t sleep, because of the cold, you know.”

“Sure.”

“It’s only — ”B.J. turned to him. There were pearls of water in his eyelashes and in the fine hairs on his shoulders where he hadn’t yet stooped to get fully below the spray. “I feel like — doesn’t it feel like we’ve been here before?”

“That’s not crazy at all, Beej,” Hawkeye said, even though his heart had leapt hopefully into his throat. “I’m in a constant state of deja vu.”

“Don’t make fun.”

“I’m not. What happened?”

B.J. turned back to the water and stuck the back of his neck under, closing his eyes. “Got a repeat customer,” he said.

“I take it he wasn’t just a fan of your work.”

B.J. shook his head. The water streamed over his chin and lips. The level of meticulous self control Hawkeye had to summon in such circumstances, to stand naked and wet six inches from B.J., equally naked and wet, and manage an often psychologically significant conversation whilst being paralyzingly jealous of water, should have won him a set of medals. “Mortar fragments to the gut,” B.J. said, “again. I cut right through my own old stitches. Not even that old — two, maybe three months?”

“I’m sorry, Beej,” Hawkeye told him, meaning it. “I wish I could tell you it got easier.”

“You know, they all look the same inside. That’s hard enough. But when they have the same face…”

“I know,” Hawkeye said. Not having his soap or towel or anything, he just stood there letting the water pour over him. The water which was always too cold when it was cold out, and too hot when it was warm out. He hoped it was being friendlier to B.J. than it was to him. Caressing B.J.’s face and his body and stroking his hair and all the things that happened in dreams or at the edge of dreams…

“I don’t ever want to see that face again,” B.J. told him, soaping his chest, “but I think I will. Nineteen years old.”

“What were you doing at nineteen?”

“Taking twenty credits of humanities courses to spite my father. Thinking about majoring in English Literature. Taking up surfing, quitting the first time I fell and inhaled half the Pacific… You?”

“Declaring my major in finding secret spots on campus to take dates,” Hawkeye recalled. “Smoking reefer for the first time and crying about how beautiful the snow was. Thinking about becoming a marine biologist because I was sure I would never hack — ha! — hack it as a surgeon.”

“How wrong we were.”

“We were kids,” Hawkeye said. “We were allowed to be wrong when we were kids.”

“And now?”

Hawkeye sighed. “The stakes are a little higher now, aren’t they?”

“They’re the only stakes,” said B.J. “Life and death. For us and for them. Holy hell, you know, I was lying in bed thinking — what if, from here on, his is the only face? What if every time I have to cut into a body it’s his?” He scrubbed a hand over his face, disheveling his mustache. “I know that's crazy. But it made me feel like time — ”

He couldn't go on. All he did for a minute was shake his head and look like he wanted to kick something.

“Sometimes I feel like time is happening differently for me than for anyone else,” Hawkeye told him, trying to tread lightly. “If it’s happening at all.”

B.J. spared him a strange look. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never thought about it before today.”

Because you don’t think about time at all, Hawkeye thought, didn't say. You go to incredible lengths of repression treating this whole ordeal like a kind of floating arrested stasis that isn't really happening, which all but guarantees that sooner or later it’ll really come back to bite you…

B.J. scrubbed a hand over his face again, and then he put the water off and groped for his towel. Hawkeye, pointedly, for other kinds of sanity reasons, did not watch him dry off or get dressed, such that once B.J. had all his layers back on he was halfway to the door before he turned back to Hawkeye in the occupied cubicle and quizzically said, “You coming?”

“I, uh, didn’t bring a towel or anything.”

B.J. gave him his, but it was so sodden that it hardly did anything, so that he was obliged to bundle up damply in all his clothes. They went running, teeth chattering, across the compound in search of hot coffee. There wasn’t any in the mess tent, so they broke into the kitchen and boiled some water, but then they couldn’t find anything to put in it. B.J. disappeared momentarily and returned with a freshly laundered surgical cap which he jammed over Hawkeye’s wet hair. That done, they were still cold enough to drink plain hot water, holding their hands up to the range like nervous little orphans.

Hawkeye didn’t know if he’d ever loved somebody too much to tell them the truth before. With Carlye, it wasn’t so much that he didn’t want to tell her the truth as that he didn’t fully understand the truth, which was that he loved her as much as he thought he could but something was missing and he couldn’t quite identify exactly what that missing thing was… it was floating ever at the edge of his consciousness and could not be grasped if you kept shoving it away in favor of working double shifts and getting back to their shared apartment after Carlye’d already gone to work only to drink a cup of coffee that was half scotch at nine AM and then pass out on the couch in a sunbeam like a cat.

He definitely loved B.J. too much to tell him the truth, which was, roughly: This place changes all of us, and there is no lifeline you can hold to for very long. Not with the gale so strong. Not with the sea so rough. And the longer and the tighter and the more desperately you hold on, the only thing you’re doing is wasting your strength. And when you can't hold on anymore, you’re going to need all of it. But if you let go now, we can swim together…

—

He made it to Reno, Nevada, two hundred and twenty miles from the supermagnetic force drawing his heart inexorably into its orbit, before he really thought through what he was doing, burned rubber on the exit off the highway, and got himself a room at a cheap motel on the edge of town. He walked down to the liquor store and bought a fifth of gin and drank about half of it, lying barefoot on the bed absently staring at reruns of _Gunsmoke_ for a couple hours, before he dared to put the TV on mute and call home.

“Dad?”

On the other end of the line he heard his father collect himself. “Hawkeye,” he said, “I’ve been worried sick.”

“I’m okay,” he said, shoving the heel of his hand into his eye. “I know I worried you and I’m sorry but I had to — I’m in Reno.”

“Reno as in Nevada?”

“The very same.”

His father took a kind of steadying, stabilizing breath. Hawkeye recognized it because he did it himself, all the time. “You know what I say about gambling,” he said. “Quit while you’re ahead. And wear a rubber, alright, son?”

“While I’m gambling?”

“You know what I mean!”

Hawkeye listened through the static for the sound of Maine. He’d left four days ago and had only stopped driving to piss or catnap in the backseat at truck stops or shovel greasy diner food into his mouth whilst flirting with anonymous waitresses. It wasn’t the same in Maine anyway after everything, so he had the idea, while drunk, obviously, that he was going to drive to California to see B.J. The embarrassing part was that it had taken him so long to swallow that bitter pill he should have gotten a head start digesting… however long ago that was that they had met. Years? Decades?

Since Elko, roughly, wired on poisonous quantities of caffeine, he had been thinking about how B.J. had probably been right. He had something to come home to and he wrote all these letters telling Hawkeye how wonderful it was. And Hawkeye stood ankle-deep in the water down at the only sandy beach in town until his feet went numb, reading those letters over and over, waiting for the moon to come up, objectively the most beautiful sight in the world, the moon coming up over Belfast Bay in August, and feeling nothing about it, because B.J. wasn’t with him, and because something like this could not be described in a letter or even by means of a photograph or a watercolor — something like this could only be witnessed ephemerally and then it was gone. So B.J. had been right. Without that very specific kind of love there was nothing to come home to. He might as well have been over there still, except that his father was making macaroni and cheese with lobster in it every night in attempt to fatten him up and had even bought a new radio.

By Reno he had come to the crux of the problem: B.J. had the right kind of love to come home to. Hawkeye was replete, lousy, overstocked with the wrong kind of love. Wherever B.J. was, was home. He was apart from B.J. so he was apart from his home even as he lived in the house where he was born and picked tomatoes from the garden and took the dinghy out to check the lobster traps. The crux was that he himself did not factor into the homeliness of B.J.’s home. In fact, Mill Valley was B.J.’s home precisely because he, Hawkeye, was very far away. Over there, B.J. had not hesitated to remind him that this was all temporary. Anyway, that was when he’d felt whacked over the head by a cast iron skillet and swerved off the highway in a state of overwhelming humiliation and urge to get drunk.

“I was going to California,” Hawkeye told his father. “But then I realized it was a fool’s errand.”

“You were going to see B.J.,” his father concluded accurately. Having after all been the person who had passed Hawkeye over the breakfast table about a letter a week since August postmarked Mill Valley.

“I figured it all out. It was silly of me to think — anyway, I’ll be home in a couple days.”

“You drove all that way and you aren't even going to cross the state line?”

“Dad,” Hawkeye said. But then he couldn’t figure out how to explain it, the great big floating horribleness, like pulling the last petal off a flower and it’s _he loves me not_. Except it was like pulling the last limb off his own body. He settled for a general summation of the problem. “My head is so fucked up.”

“It’s okay, I know,” said his father. “Are you at a hotel? Will you stay there a couple days and sleep?”

“Sure I will, dad.”

“And then come home in one piece, alright?”

“Alright.”

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart, et cetera et cetera.”

“Where are you staying? So I can call and check on you?”

Hawkeye took the matchbook from the front desk out of his pocket and studied it. “The Sandman Motel Reno,” he read. “Room twelve.”

Logically he should have known what his father would do with this information but he hadn’t slept right for days. Once he'd gotten off the phone he laid down on top of the greasy coverlet and had a dream they’d put him on the bus like he was dead again, but he was alive this time and they couldn’t tell. And he woke up hungover and starving just before dawn because someone was pounding on the door.

Of course, it was B.J. Hawkeye wasn’t fully awake enough to process that he was being pulled like a rag doll into B.J.’s arms. They might have been lucky it was before dawn in a city like this where there would be nobody on the street to watch them embracing on the dingy threshold like reunited lovers. When he realized it wasn't a dream he found all the needling uncertainties banished to the back of his mind as they customarily were when they were in one another’s presence. They were real and alive and holding each other in America and as much as it would never be over it was over enough for now. He let his hands rest under B.J.’s shoulders and felt his deep ponderous breathing and for a moment they could have been somewhere else.

B.J. let him go after forever, almost reluctantly. His eyes were wet in the dim blue light. “Civvies,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s funny to see you — ” He smiled with all those teeth, pressing the back of his hand under his eye — “with slacks on, I mean.”

“I’ll never wear green again,” Hawkeye said. “Looking at it makes me want to.”

“Want to what?”

“Commit felonies. But B.J., what are you even doing here?”

“Your dad called me and I started driving just about as soon as I got off the phone.”

“But — Peg and — ”

“Erin said to give you this,” said B.J., and he took out a folded piece of paper from the front pocket of his flannel shirt and unfolded it to show Hawkeye a somewhat abstract crayon drawing of a charmingly bucolic child-dream scene featuring a rainbow and some fluffy trees and two stick figures standing close on a field of pink. “She wanted me to include it in my next letter but I figured this was just as good. And Peg said to give you this.” With that, he kissed Hawkeye on the cheek.

Time stilled. Somewhere a bird was singing. His lips rasped against Hawkeye’s unshaven face. Then it was over.

Hawkeye touched his cheek where B.J.’s lips had left a warm imprint under his skin, remembering Radar and Trapper. 1951? Yesterday? He felt like gravity had somewhat changed bearing. “Peg said — ” He managed, aware that he was spluttering, “are you — ”

B.J. smiled the _nothing’s wrong_ smile. “She said to give you a kiss.” The _nothing’s wrong_ laughter was in his voice. It was belied somewhat by the fact that his eyes were still wet. “You know, once upon a time I knew you to speak in coherent sentences.”

“Yeah, well. I just woke up and you kissed me good morning. And we’ve never seen each other before in America and now here we are in neon fantasyland. I’m a little verklempt, I guess.”

B.J. grinned. “Let me buy you breakfast,” he said.

“Alright. Let me brush my teeth. There’s a diner back toward the highway.”

This was a strange green and concrete and unplugged neon city in a bowl of featureless desert mountains. It was late October and the air was crisp and bright. Nobody else was awake yet. The only other people on the street had been up all night and were heading home. Working girls, unlucky gamblers, night janitors in navy blue jumpsuits smoking unfiltered cigarettes and letting the sparks bounce in the empty street…

“Have you ever been here before,” Hawkeye asked.

“All the time. It's just a four or five hour drive from the Bay. In school sometimes we would come on weekends, throw away some money. You?”

“I’d never been west of Chicago until three days ago.”

“How was the drive?”

“Well it was pretty mind-numbing until it got beautiful. Utah was really something else. What do they call those mountains — ?”

“The Wasatch?”

“Yeah, them. And then that great big salt lake, and then more desert, desert, desert…”

“Back to the mind numbing?”

“Not as numb as my ass, by that point.”

Nevada, the unending brutal sprawl of Nevada along Route 40, had been a kind of landscape of the soul. The sky was a bitter gunmetal gray containing not a drop of rain. It had not been entirely lost on Hawkeye that he had put himself through the worst of the mental wringer along the parts of the former California trail where would-be settlers had abandoned their furniture and livestock to the desert. If he had been up to it he would probably have thought about how another inescapable cyclical narrative being told over and over again because all the parties involved refuse to learn from their mistakes is that of America.

“Why’d you stop?” B.J. asked him.

“Stop what?”

“Stop driving?”

The trick was to partner a white lie with the truth. “I had to sleep. I was starting to have nightmares with my eyes open.”

Hawkeye watched B.J.’s mouth move around the starts of many different words. “So are you coming the rest of the way to Mill Valley today?”

He was very lucky to have timed this impossible question precisely to their arrival at the diner. “Ha ha,” Hawkeye said, opening the door to the jingle of the hanging bells and a sleepy waitress’s entreaty to “You boys sit wherever you want…”

They piled into a corner booth. For a second Hawkeye thought B.J. was going to share one side of the table with him, the way they’d done in the mess tent, but then he seemed to remember where he was and took his own little leather banquette. Sat down, about a thousand expressions on his face at once, folding his hands on top of the paper placemat. Real, here, alive, knees almost touching. Dawn emerged from beneath the rim of mountains and cast its pale, strange light over the concrete and asphalt, as though somewhere the unseen cinematographer had applied vaseline to the lens.

“How’s home?” Hawkeye asked, even though he didn’t particularly want to know. Under the table, B.J. stretched his long legs out so that his knee brushed Hawkeye's knee and his sneaker pressed against the arch of Hawkeye's boot. How was it possible that he had once been used to this? Once this had just been Tuesday, choking down World War II surplus in the squalid mess. These days it had his guts in his throat. Absence makes the heart go thunder, or whatever it was that people said.

“Home is — ” He was blessed and cursed with that beatific grin. “Home is home.”

“Right.”

B.J.’s smile faltered. “What have you been up to?”

Hawkeye’s brain felt like what all the casinos around them probably looked like at night: lots of screaming neon and wing-dinging clockwork:

  1. I don’t remember
  2. Belatedly negotiating the role I played and still play in the imperialist war machine, re-reading Marx, being sick
  3. Dissociating in the bathtub
  4. Is it even over? 
  5. All of the above



“I’ve been, um, busy,” he managed, wincing at how pathetic it was. “You know, I’d been voted Crabapple Cove’s most eligible bachelor three years running before the draft got me, and I had to reclaim my title.”

“I thought it was something like that, considering you haven’t responded to any of my letters.”

Thankfully the waitress come over with coffee. B.J. ordered the #4 Special. Hawkeye hadn’t even looked at the menu so he just asked for the same thing. “How do you like your eggs,” she asked him.

“Scrambled. A little runny.”

“And you?” she asked, turning to B.J.

“Sunny side up. Over just about as easy as you can stand it.”

The waitress winked at him. “I like your style,” she said. Hawkeye groaned. “Coming right up.”

They both watched her sashay away. “Did you make it,” B.J. asked.

Hawkeye dared to give him an eyebrow. “Not yet,” he said.

B.J. laughed. “I mean the title.”

“No, I was disqualified.”

“How’d that happen?”

“I didn’t ask, I mean it could be that I’m thirty-four, or that my hair’s turned white, or that I’ve lost my mind.”

B.J. stirred an insane quantity of sugar into his coffee, the way he always did when he’d been up all night. “The grey is very dignified,” he said, in order to not address the other thing.

“Dignity is overrated,” Hawkeye said. “I’d rather be abject.”

They talked about absolutely nothing. It was murderous. B.J. asked him about Crabapple Cove. Hawkeye said that things were fine. He told B.J. he’d gotten a job at the regional hospital in Belfast and left out the part about how after three weeks doing it, after the first bad one, the first destroyed child, hit by a car out on Route 3, he’d gone to his boss and said he didn’t think he was really cut out for this anymore, even though he’d saved the little girl’s life. And then he'd gone home to his father and said he was going to join the Merchant Marine, but instead he'd just gotten drunk. He told B.J. his dad was doing well. This at least was true: he’d taken up needlepointing and was acting like a bit of a beatnik because he spent so much time listening to the college radio and reading Salinger and Steinbeck. B.J. thought this was funny. His laugh was murderous. The waitress brought their breakfasts just about the time Hawkeye decided he'd never be hungry for anything again besides the obvious.

The #4 Special turned out to be eggs and sausage with hash browns and well-buttered toast. The plates were delivered, the coffee refreshed. B.J. asked for a glass of orange juice which was brought to him neon yellow and sweating. Outside the sun made its first swooning move beyond the horizon, throwing a beam of bright gold light over the quiet street. Like a fur stole over the world’s shoulder…

“Hawk,” B.J. said in the soft kind of coaxing tone.

“Hmm?”

“What’re you looking at?”

“Hmm? Oh, nothing.”

He unwrapped his fork and knife from the strangling embrace of the paper napkin and pushed the eggs around a little. _We’ll come east and we’ll have dinner_ … god if it didn’t hurt even worse than he’d thought it would then.

“Hawk,” B.J. said again, and Hawkeye looked up, unable to resist, knowing he'd regret this. “Will you — I’m sorry. I just want to know what happened.”

“What do you mean, what happened?”

“Why — why your dad called me and said… why you stopped driving.”

Hawkeye allowed himself a single steadying breath. “What always happens?” he asked. “I drink instead of sleeping and then I have some terrible idea, but nobody’s there to stop me or call it brilliant. Or even laugh with me about it, you know. So then I get halfway through the execution before the cold light of day arrives.”

B.J. split his egg yolk and watched the yellow spill over the hash browns and chipped blue china like sunrise or a nuclear accident. “I don’t think it was a terrible idea,” he said softly.

“That’s very generous of you.”

“We would’ve — ” B.J. stopped, visibly repressed some things, started again. “I’d love to have you. In Mill Valley, I mean.”

A conversation Hawkeye would’ve loved to have had was:

_“Why do we always talk around everything that’s hurting us?”_

_“Because if we talked about those things, we’d end up having a screaming fight and then fucking on this table.”_

_“I don't know. You don’t think we’d have more self-control than that?”_

_“You think we would, after all this time? I feel like that autoclave when it got overpressurized.”_

_“Fair point.”_

Instead he said, “And I’d love — B.J., that’s not it.”

“Then what is it? I don’t understand.”

“I know. It’s me — that’s all. It’s — you don’t have to — ” He covered his eyes with his hand. “I’m just sorry.”

He couldn’t see B.J.’s face except for behind his closed, burning eyes, but he did feel it when B.J. reached across the table and wrapped a hand around his wrist and held it tightly for a long time. The sun moved across the floor.

Close but no cigar.

—

“Not this again.”

His teeth were clattering. B.J. turned away from the scrub sink and looked him over. “This again,” he said.

“I hate when we’re here. I mean, I hate it all the time but it’s worst when we’re here, do you agree?”

B.J. studied the myriad of bubbles coating his hands and forearms halfway to the elbow, seeking patterns. “I thought you were talking about surgery,” he said.

“No, I’m talking about the other thing. Of course we’re in surgery. They put us through this again and again as punishment.”

“Who do you think _they_ is,” B.J. asked. Had they already hashed out _Punishment for what?_ Hawkeye after all knew the answer to that one but wasn’t about to say it out loud. Maybe that was why B.J. hadn’t asked him that question.

“I dunno. Who sent Dante and Virgil to hell?”

“Virgil was in hell because he was born before Christ,” B.J. said. “Dante just went on a hiking trip and got sidetracked.”

“Is that really what happened?” Hawkeye asked. “I haven't actually read the _Divine Comedy_.”

B.J. shrugged. “There was a period of time when I threatened to study literature.”

Hawkeye reached for the soap and got a good lather up. The dastardly siren song of the choppers by now was general. The disembodied entity which relayed puns and bad news over the P.A. system was wailing wildly and the nurses and corpsmen were bustling and shouting at triage just beyond the doors, where he had come from…

“It’s bad out there,” he warned B.J.

“It’s always bad out there.”

“There’s four bad chest cases. Do we have Charles in this one, or Frank?”

“Charles — Hawk, Frank’s been gone for months, are you okay?”

He ignored that last bit. “Thank god,” he said. “You ready?”

“Yes, are you?”

Hawkeye tied B.J.’s mask on so B.J. tied his mask on. This was almost enough of a near-embrace, some days, to stabilize things when they got too loose and gooey to go on.

“Are you sure,” B.J. asked him. Above the mask his eyes were worried. There was something strange and special about this: in there with two thirds of the face concealed behind the white cotton mask and hairnet cap, the eyes had to tell the bewildering story of all feeling, and sometimes they succeeded — sometimes too well — and sometimes not.

“Surer than,” Hawkeye said.

“After this,” B.J. told him, “I’m putting you to bed.”

“Will you tuck me in?”

“Of course, dear.”

Then they went in to face the gauntlet. There was some or another new offensive up some or another hill. He made the concerted effort, as he found he had to when it was worst, to study every face throughly enough to understand it was a human being he was working on and not a disembodied chest cavity.

It was a bad day; he put four hours of work into one who died in post-op that afternoon and there was another who died waiting for a table so it was like he lost two, which was a bad count even on a heavy day. When they were drinking coffee in the mess at midnight Radar came in and said there were ambulances and choppers coming down from the line and they’d be out front in fifteen minutes, so Hawkeye put his head down on the table and had a dream he was in a diner that was floating on a lake, watching out the window at a water-skiing competition until the waitress, who was Carlye, brought him a pair of human kidneys on a blue plate.

B.J. woke him up with a hand at his shoulder and kept it there, watching the dream blow out of his face with a sympathetic furrowed brow. Above the choppers cutting air. “Sorry,” B.J. said finally. “I’m breaking my promise.”

“What promise?”

“I said I’d put you to bed.”

He remembered telling Henry, _You’re the second person to make me that offer_. That felt like it had been years ago and also yesterday, but if this was just the same handful of stories happening over and over again, how had Henry died?

“It wouldn’t be any use after that dream,” he told B.J., getting up. Sometimes he felt incredibly old, but he had only been thirty-two for decades. They were alone in the mess tent except for all the trays of uneaten, steaming, hideous, horrific “food,” and B.J. wouldn’t let go of his shoulder, so that he couldn't exactly place the source of the weakness in his shaky knees. “My ex-lover was trying to turn me cannibal,” he explained as they went out into the bloodbath. It was so cold that the spilled blood from previous waves of wounded had frozen in the mud.

“Sidney would say it has something to do with sex,” B.J. told him, trying to keep the lightness in his voice for the last couple seconds that he could.

“Right,” Hawkeye said. Love after all in itself being a cannibal act: all that bloody longing to devour or be devoured. But that wasn't what the dream was about and he knew it. The dream was about never being able to escape from this, he thought, crouching beside an unconscious patient in the frozen mud and lifting the pressure bandage bound tightly over his chest and stomach.

They went back to the scrub room — “Not this again!” “This again…” — then back to the O.R. and Hawkeye asked the corpsman for each and every name and tried to think of each and every body by each and every name, reminding himself that each and every name was different as each and every body was different and even that if he recognized his own stitches or B.J.’s or Charles’s or Potter’s or Frank’s or even Margaret’s, each and every body was different and each and every cut was different and each and every day was different, each and every day was another day —

“You know, Beej,” Hawkeye announced, eventually, over his last patient, over the mess of bloody sheets and grist and flesh, over the blood in his boots and the body on the table a tangle of bloody colors and bloody clamps, the body which was named Cameron Adler, “I’m trapped in the same nightmare over and over, and I want to know what I have to do to get out.”

Potter looked up from his patient and looked him up and down. Hawkeye, guiltily, watched him make a mental note to worry about this later.

“That might be the sanest thing you’ve ever said, _Pehhhhce_ ,” said Charles, throwing a blood-soaked sponge on the floor. “Do let me know if you find out.”

B.J. was closing his kid with picture-perfect mattress stitches. “Well, I feel like the lesson of most fairy tales is, just be yourself.”

—

They had never been his vice, but he wasn’t above smoking a cigarette once in a while, on New Years’ for instance, except it wasn’t New Years’, it was oppressively hot, and the cigarette tasted almost unbearably stale, and above him a neon light flicked on, shouting _No-Tel Motel_.

A kind of new-old shame came scintillating back to him. He was certain he hadn’t been here before, except that he had, in New York and in Boston for instance, but it had had different names then. There was the Pines out on Route 2 beyond the protective circumference of Route 128, where Massachusetts started to turn wild, and where, for a while, in the late 1940s, otherwise known as the early period P.C. (post-Carlye), he had occasionally met this guy named George, who was a married French professor at B.U., and who had given him all these paperbacks by Jean Genet. He had read those back home in Cambridge with the kind of special terror that accompanies self-recognition.

He finished the cigarette and dropped it in a planter and went back around the flank of his rental car to room number twelve which he managed to unlock after three agonizing minutes with a lot of jiggling of the unruly key. His hands were shaking. His heart and gut were in a tandem state of crisis. The room smelled like even worse cigarettes than the ones he’d been smoking, and infidelity, and steam, and an old vacuum cleaner, and above the bed — the bed… — there was a pastoral watercolor which was crooked.

B.J. came out of the shower in a towel, dripping. “Oh,” he said when he saw Hawkeye by the T.V. “I thought you were going to the liquor store.”

“I changed my mind halfway. It’s a trillion degrees out there.” Better this than _I know what's coming and I want to be sober_. “Jesus,” he said, settling a hand over his slamming heart. He couldn’t stop now that it had started. “I must have missed you bad. It felt like a rubber band stretching.”

B.J.’s face went through stages of grief or something. “Sit down,” he said. “Have a glass of water and let me get my clothes on.”

There was really no point in him putting them on, they were going to come off, surely, after what had happened earlier that day in the men’s room at the convention center, but Hawkeye understood he had to do it so he could keep on maintaining whatever charade. He sat down at the little table by the window and watched the neon flicker over the parking lot and the squalid pool, and then he closed the moldering brocade curtains. Traced a drop of water across the table until it dissipated. Watched his own rapid heartbeat shake the thin fabric of his t-shirt until he had to look away across the room. Thought about his conversation with B.J.’s wife on the telephone two months previous:

“Hello?”

“Good afternoon,” said the most exquisite voice possessed by any living woman, which Hawkeye had heard before, on that video reel, in the Colonel’s office. “I’m looking for Benjamin Franklin Pierce.”

“Well you found him. Sorry, is this — ”

“Hawkeye, it’s Peg. Peg Hunnicutt.”

All his internal organs set to strangling each other. His voice sounded weak and choked when he managed, “Is B.J. alright?”

“Hawkeye,” Peg told him, sounding like she was about to cry, which, holy hell, it was like being killed slowly, “I’m very sorry — maybe I shouldn’t — you should know he’s in one piece.” The momentary relief that washed over him was tempered like hot glass by what she said next. “He’s at work now which is why I’m — he’s whole but he’s not well, is what I’m trying to tell you.”

None of us are very well, Hawkeye didn't say. Or very whole, for that matter. It had only been a matter of time before it caught up with B.J., even though if this was true it would mean everything B.J. had assumed would catch him after the war had fallen through. That probably hurt just about as bad as whatever other pain he was feeling. “I’m sorry to hear that,” Hawkeye told Peg, meaning it, even as some raccoon-like thing inside him was already drafting a letter to B.J. that just read _I TOLD YOU SO_.

“The last time he had any… I don’t know how to say it. The last time he acted almost like he did before the war was when he went to see you in Reno.”

It was May then. It must have been a long winter for Peg. “There’s a conference in Ohio in July,” Hawkeye said. “It’s a heart surgery shindig in Columbus. I’ll be there and I’ve been trying to get him to come…”

“I’ll make sure of it,” said Peg.

After that he’d called B.J. once a fortnight or so and close-read his letters like his old English major girlfriends and boyfriends at Bowdoin had pored over Beowulf, but B.J.’s emotional book wasn’t just closed but shut down under lock and key, as was customary. Finally he lurked around check-in at the conference for B.J. to show up and then allowed himself to be hugged for a long time in front of a lot of people, and wined and dined in the hotel bar before noon thus missing the lecture he had possibly most wanted to attend on arterial transplants, and finally herded into the men’s room when no one was looking and kissed very softly and frightenedly against the locked door.

His brain felt like a telephone switchboard that had just given up. Maybe it made him a bad person to just let it go where it was wanting to go from there. On the plane home he could think about how nothing could possibly be stupider than this. For now it could just be a dream. All he had ever wanted to be was what B.J. needed. Who could begrudge him that?

Eventually, back in real time, whenever that was, B.J. came over, buttoning this short-sleeve white button-up in which he looked like a deceptively skilled weekend bowler, and sat on the well-jounced motel bed so that the springs winced and their knees brushed, throwing sparks through two layers of humid denim.

“We don't have to — we can just talk,” Hawkeye told him, but if this was what ended up happening he was going to regret not going to the liquor store.

“Is that what you want?”

“No.”

B.J. touched his knee. Something circling in his hard blue eye not so much fear but close. They leaned into one another at the same time so that they bumped foreheads before their lips met. It was better than it had been in the afternoon because they had time and the curtains were shut and they were well and truly alone.

It seemed impossible that this was really happening, and yet it was. Some semi-rational alien entity in the back of Hawkeye’s mind was thrashing about in the quicksand, waving its arms desperately, shouting, “You’ll never survive this! And even if by some miracle you do, you’ll never survive the guilt that'll come next!” But then it went under and a couple of bubbles came up and that was that.

“What are we doing,” B.J. said against Hawkeye’s mouth. The second time he’d said such a thing today. Except the first time, Hawkeye had said “making love,” and B.J. had taken a big step back into the sink.

“Skipping that lecture on stents,” he said this time. 

“I mean — you know what I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Hawkeye said. “You tell me.”

“You might regret this.”

“Statistically, I think, you’re more likely to.”

“I don’t want to.”

But you will, Hawkeye didn’t say. God damn. Just have the decency to tell me you will…

Instead he fell forward again into the kiss and then they fell together into the bed and put the light out and got naked. The whole thing was right as rain. Their skin together was right as rain and their hands all over each other were right as rain and even the rough motel sheets washed a couple of hundred thousand times after a couple of hundred thousand inadvisable adulterous liaisons might as well have been silk… I will never find peace until you take me, Hawkeye thought when it was really getting hot and heavy. That was from Genet, but he forgot which one. Momentarily, he forgot almost everything.

Afterward they lay there for a long time just breathing together in rough synchronization. Outside Hawkeye could hear the rain hissing on the hot concrete. He felt unable to speak. Anything he said would have felt kind of trite. For a little while he shut his eyes and dozed enough to experience some scattered dreamish things that flitted across his consciousness. After not so very long he half-roused enough to find that B.J. was stroking his face. He lay there and tried to pretend he was still asleep for a while because he knew when he opened his eyes it would be over, and he felt B.J.’s thumb pass over his lips and his nose and the corner of his cheek under his eye, and he thought he would have died of tenderness had he not been killed already.

He could not hold the wolves at bay for much longer after that. Eventually he felt B.J. turn over onto his back and felt his breathing even and slow… When he opened his eyes the room was dark and warm and there was a wedge of rain-spattered moonlight thrown over the bed like a knit blanket. It was too hot for much but the well-bleached sheet drawn crookedly over their tangled legs. Inevitably, that sinking feeling visited him with the violence of a first frost. “You could have just told him to get a therapist,” said the rational alien in the back of his mind, emerging from the quicksand and shaking off like a dog. “You selfish bastard!”

“I’ve done this before and I don’t like it,” he said aloud, not sure whether he hoped B.J. was awake to hear him.

B.J.’s eyes opened and met his across the lumpy pillow. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking genuinely contrite. “I would’ve stopped if you — ”

“Not that,” Hawkeye assured him. “Obviously I liked that. I think I blacked out. I meant — ” He gestured between them which only compelled him to sink his fingers into B.J.’s chest hair. “I’ve already been some married straight guy’s guilty motel tryst and I like you a lot better than I liked him which makes the whole thing even worse and I don’t want to do it again.”

“What _do_ you want?”

“Don’t ask me that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not edifying to say.”

B.J.’s forehead creased. Hawkeye watched the regret seeping in like rainwater through the ceiling. “You can tell me anything,” B.J. said.

“No, I can’t. I want to, but I can’t.”

“Why not?”

This was completely infuriating. “You go first,” Hawkeye said. “You tell me what you want.”

He was not expecting what happened next, which was that, slowly, as he thought about the question, the warm if apprehensive expression on B.J.’s face began to falter incrementally until it collapsed completely into a horribly familiar rictus of uncertainty and shame and fear. His big blue eyes turned wet and grayish like a bad day at the end of the winter and at last he cried so that Hawkeye had to gather up as much of him as could be held and hold him together and say there there and things and try to keep from crying himself while B.J. said, over and over again, shaking apart, speaking for both of them, Hawkeye figured later, not that B.J. knew it then, “I don't know, I don’t know, I don't know.”

—

“They tell me you’re not sleeping,” Sidney said amiably, putting his feet up on the radiator.

“Who told you that?”

“Your chess buddies. They also told me you always start with the same opening, but then you expect something different to happen every time.”

This wasn’t necessarily true. It was just that he only knew the one opening.

“Not sleeping is the only way I know time is really moving forward,” Hawkeye said. “You have to watch sometimes to really keep tabs on it or otherwise they could pull a fast one on you.”

Sidney’s brow had cocked halfway up his forehead but he kept his voice very measured and calm when he asked, “Who do you think you mean by _they_?”

He was never sure of the answer to this question and anyway it was a moot point because Sidney quickly changed the subject and that night for dinner there was an extra pill in the little cup with the antibiotics. (He'd sliced his leg pretty good getting out of the jeep after running it through the O Club, and then there was a lot of limping and pacing and shouting until Potter showed up with a syringe of choral hydrate, and then B.J. carried him like a bride over the threshold of the VIP tent so that nobody would see him in post-op. And then Margaret did the sutures, apparently, but by that time his consciousness had pretty much dissolved.) He knew what it was but took it anyway and waited for the entire world to reset on him. But instead he woke up in the same dark little room in that dark little hospital when Sidney knocked upon the door.

“How’d you sleep?”

“Fine. You?”

“Dreams?”

This was an interesting line of questioning. “No,” he said.

(“I keep having these very vivid dreams,” he’d told Sidney years ago. “Dreams about what happens after this.”

“I can’t believe I have to tell you that that’s perfectly normal,” Sidney’d said. This had been a strictly informal conversation at dawn after about a hundred hands of poker. The dark circles under Sidney’s eyes weren’t so dark back then and he still had that way of holding a cigarette — this was before he’d quit — so that you didn't even have to hear him speak to know he was from New York. “What happens in them?”

“It’s mostly me and, um, Lana Turner meeting at a seedy motel.”

Sidney laughed. “Hawkeye, you are an exceptional man in many ways. But not in every way.”)

“I had a dream I was in 181st Street Station,” Sidney said, opening the venetian blinds, “and the light and the sound were coming, you know, like the train was coming up from underground… but it kept getting louder and louder and brighter and brighter and there was no train at all, just the light and sound, and then I woke up.”

He looked at Hawkeye with his brows raised expectantly. “I’m not a psychoanalyst,” Hawkeye said.

“I’d still value your opinion as a doctor.”

“It sounds like you're undersexed and preoccupied by the atomic bomb,” he decided. “Aren't we all.”

“Do you still have those dreams about Lana Turner?”

Hawkeye laughed or tried to but some kind of sad huff sound came out. “All the time.”

Sidney sat down and put his feet up on the radiator again. “I think I miss New York,” he mused. “Somehow.”

Having worked for a summer in med school in the E.R. at New York Presbyterian, Hawkeye knew all about how New Yorkers could pretend they hated New York all they wanted and expostulate for hours on end about how they wanted to be anywhere else more than anything, but it was in their very souls.

“I miss the subway,” Sidney went on. “I miss… the ritual of it, every morning, all of us strangers reading the paper.”

“Maybe you should talk to somebody.”

“I think part of me is nervous to go home,” Sidney continued, keeping his voice light in the way he did, watching unfocusedly at the window, no doubt thinking about the Brooklyn Bridge or something, “because it’ll have changed. And I’ll have changed too. And maybe we won’t know each other anymore.”

Hawkeye just stared at him incredulously. He liked Sidney very much but you really could have enough of the psychological mumbo jumbo pretty quick. “Can we get on with it so that I can go back to hell?”

“You really want to go back there,” Sidney observed.

“I don't know, I only figure that if I have to be in Korea, I might as well be useful.”

“Trying to operate on a patient without anesthesia isn’t very useful.”

“It’s not — it was just that — I couldn’t, she covered its face — ”

“Whose face?”

“His face, the wounded kid’s face! Sidney, sometimes you really make me feel like I’m explaining a movie to a blind person! Do you want to hear about Gloria Swanson swanning toward the camera in that off-the-shoulder dress?”

Sidney got up, settling the front feet of his chair soundlessly back against the tile floor. “I don't think you’re ready for your close-up,” he said. “How about a cup of tea.”

They didn’t have coffee in this place, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Not very long after that, that afternoon or that week or that month at least, they started on the experimental shock therapy, which was how Hawkeye thought of B.J. showing up. This was the worst part every time. “What happens in this one,” he asked at the sight of B.J. silhouetted in the door in olive drab and Chuck Taylors. For some reason he felt obliged to hang his head. “Do you tell me about your daughter again?”

B.J.’s stupid blue eyes. For once he really looked afraid.

“Go ahead, Beej,” he said, giving up, that after all being better than this, “tell me about her.”

Those kid gloves kind of snapped around the wrist. He braced himself to be treated like a patient.

“Hawk,” B.J. said evenly. He stepped into the room and the door closed behind him sequestering them both into a prison within a prison which only one of them could leave. “This hasn’t happened before,” B.J. said. “I’ve never been here before. _You’ve_ never been here before.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“As I live and breathe.” He sat down in Sidney’s usual chair. His bedside manner didn't really translate to these sorts of circumstances, but he was trying. “It’s okay to be confused. You’ve been through a hell of a lot.”

“Been through hell, you mean.”

“We all have. I’ll be Dante, if you be Virgil.”

Hawkeye hadn’t read the _Divine Comedy_ , but he was pretty sure that Virgil never said anything like, why are you still following me? I have no idea how to get out of here. Do you think I know how to get out of here? If I did, I wouldn’t be here anymore. If Virgil had said that last bit, he might have been lying. So he shut his mouth.

“It’s weird not to have you there,” B.J. went on. “It’s quiet in the O.R.”

“Tell Charles to bring his record player in, or else Klinger can read tarot cards.”

B.J. smiled brittlely. He seemed pleased that conversation had returned to a familiar if stilted bent. “It wouldn’t be the same,” he said.

“What did Sidney tell you about my condition?”

The curveball was so sudden that it made B.J. recoil a bit. “He said you were doing better.”

“Better enough to — ”

“No. He didn’t say that.”

“Did he say what's wrong with me?”

“He didn’t — but — ”

“How can they keep a person here without any charges?” He got up. The springs of the cot squealed, and the front feet of B.J.’s chair met the ground hard. “How can they keep a person somewhere and not even tell them what they have to do to get out?”

“Hawk, you know what you have to do,” B.J. said.

“No, I don’t!”

“Well, the first step is admitting the truth.”

God damn if it wasn't always this! “What truth?”

“That you had some kind of psychological… break or something!”

He took one of those deep steadying breaths that his father always did but it didn’t sound steady at all. “I’m not crazy,” he said.

“No, you're not, but a person — even you! — can only exist so long in a crazy-making environment before it rubs off on you.”

“So you admit it.”

“What? Admit what?”

“That this place was specifically designed for purposes of psychic torture!”

He watched B.J. make a couple hopeless mental calculations. “All war is,” he said. “War is antithetical to the conditions… the condition of humanity.”

“Well, has it rubbed off on you?”

The moment that B.J.’s eyes met his, he regretted asking. Of course it had — that wasn’t the problem.

“Hawk,” B.J. said, “you didn’t see yourself. And I did see you and — I don’t want to — I wish I hadn’t — ” He sucked his teeth.

“I’ve done crazier things before and they let me keep cutting, didn't they?”

Once they’d carried him to the VIP tent and sewed up his leg, he kept trying to get up. He remembered that. He had the feeling that there was someone somewhere who needed him. B.J. kept pushing him back down by the shoulder. B.J. who went away and came back sometimes and he looked like he’d been crying. Evidently something had been wrong with the batch of choral hydrate, as was unfortunately typical for army sedatives, so that it came around on him in waves and sometimes all he could do was stare at the shadows in the ceiling and sometimes somebody would be talking a million miles an hour about something he couldn’t understand and eventually he realized the someone was himself. Everybody took turns sitting with him and they all looked nervous. As well they should have, they didn't even know any of this stuff was happening to them over and over!

B.J.’s tone was agitated — in fact an outside observer might have said that it was a great deal more agitated than Hawkeye’s — and his eyes were steely. “You never did anything before that could have killed someone!” he announced.

“Killed someone?”

“What if Igor had been behind the bar washing glasses? What if you had cut into that unanesthetized kid before we stopped you?”

“B.J., you think I could have _killed_ someone?”

That was the ticket. Nice one! B.J.’s entire face went through stages of grief or something, so that even before everything that happened next Hawkeye thought he knew what was coming. That dread was old and there was a touch of sweet sickliness about it, like the flower arrangements beside a hospital bed or in a funeral home… And then B.J. was on his feet in the door calling down the hall for a nurse with a straightjacket, but he only got Sidney. Then Hawkeye got the truth, by which point B.J. was long gone, and then, not long after that, he was even more gone, until he came back. It had all happened before, and it would happen again, but it never got easier.

—

Late at night, Hawkeye was sitting on the porch alone in the cold with a cup of coffee with scotch in it, listening to the low, mournful sounds of ships’ bells drifting across the fog and the water, when a taxicab pulled up in front of the house, throwing a circlet of white light against the dirt road and the bare winter trees. The person that got out, of course, was B.J. For a while, as the taxicab pulled back up the street toward downtown and the highway, they just stood there in the dim light, watching each other, not quite daring to believe any of it was real.

At last B.J. asked, “Can I come in?”

“No,” Hawkeye said, watching B.J.’s face fall. “My dad’s asleep upstairs.”

“Is there a pub we could go to?”

“They’ll be closed. It’s Tuesday… you just wait here, hang on.”

When he went inside, of course, his father was at the top of the stairs in his dressing gown. “Who’s that, Hawk?”

He didn't really know why he lied so quickly or why it was so easy. “It’s Marnie Lawson,” he said. “You know her sister’s pregnant…”

“Is everybody okay?”

“I’ll take care of it. You go back to sleep.”

To keep up appearances he grabbed the messenger bag in which he kept all his house call supplies from the coat rack behind the door, but, trying to be surreptitious, he also shoved a bottle of gin in it. After some deliberation he scribbled a note for his father in case he didn’t make it back that night, and pinned it under the saltshaker on the kitchen table. _Dear Dad, I lied, but I’m fine, back soon._ Then he grabbed the keys for the old Volvo from the dish by the door. Outside B.J. was milling aimlessly on the dark lawn, hugging himself against the cold. “Come on,” Hawkeye said.

They piled into the car. “It feels like I could get frostbite if I touched you, Hawk,” B.J. said, slamming the passenger side door shut.

“Welcome to January in Maine.” Hawkeye cranked the heat on the center console of the Volvo. “Let us both warm up, will you?”

B.J. had sent some letters, but they were written in a kind of obscure code, as though he were still trying to get secret things past the censors. Not that Hawkeye was expecting anything florid and colorful from Mr. Married and Repressed, but after everything he was anticipating more than _Today there was a blackbird in the yard._

He had drafted a letter that he hadn't sent, which he’d hidden in the pocket of his Class As in his trunk in the attic: _I know you don’t love me the same as I love you and I know the way you do love me is changing and shrinking now that we don’t have to be together every minute of the day and I know (from experience) that it seems like everybody else in the world has purposefully forgotten something very important and I know (from experience) that you feel so lonely that you are attaching additional and inaccurate significance to the way you feel about me, but I’m only asking that you have a little respect for the fact that I did let you inside me and held you while you cried and tried as hard as I could to guard your heart for hundreds of years. Remember when I asked you to have the decency to tell me goodbye? I know you don’t mean to hurt me, I think you mean the opposite, but these letters you send where you say nothing at all are like the nine-hundred-ninety-eighth cut and I can only survive a thousand…_

Hawkeye’s father had last driven the Volvo, and he had left the college station on at maximum volume, so that the sounds of Miles Davis — something off _Blue Moods_ — filled the car as soon as the ignition churned into life. Not bothering to turn it down, Hawkeye backed out of the driveway and headed out of the silent neighborhood toward downtown Belfast.

“Where are we going?” B.J. asked.

“Somewhere we can talk.” Hawkeye chewed his lip. “How did you even get here?”

“I flew to Bangor and got a cab.”

That was an hour's drive north. “How much did that cost you?”

“A lot.”

There was nobody downtown but the windows of some of the apartments and offices above the shops and restaurants lining the street were lit and glowing from within through the hoar of frost upon the glass. As they headed north on Church Street toward Route 1 Hawkeye reached for the shifter to put the Volvo in second gear and felt B.J.’s hand wrap around his wrist, clammy, gentle, seeking permission. It was all well and good until B.J.’s first two fingers pressed into Hawkeye's radial artery and he had no choice but to shake the grip off. He could feel his own heartbeat in his teeth so he knew the results would not have been edifying.

There was a motel at the edge of town called the Admiral’s Arms. It was somewhat inconvenient because it was halfway to Searsport, but it was also rather well regarded in Waldo County for its discretion and affordability. Hawkeye went alone into the office to shell out five bucks to whatever pimply teenager was behind the desk only to be told there was just one room left, which was not unsurprising given it was Tuesday. It was a cold enough night, Hawkeye figured, crossing back across the parking lot toward the pacing shivering shadow of B.J. in the moonlight, that a warm bed with another warm body was just about the best place on earth to be.

In the motel room, number twelve, they pulled the greasy duvet off the bed and pulled the sheets back and took their shoes off and lay down fully clothed facing each other on a single pillow like twins in utero.

“Peg asked for a divorce,” B.J. said after a while.

Hawkeye carefully filtered the meaning of these words. His brain was taking off on a couple of disparate tracks, a few of which ended in a plunge into a fiery chasm. “I’m sorry,” he said, hoping that the tone of his voice conveyed the extremity to which he was sorry.

“It’s alright. She’s just the one who said it first. I’d already left her in all but name, you know.”

“Does she know about — ”

“She knows I — I didn’t say it was… with you.”

“Right.” Hawkeye swallowed. Inside his brain, someone had taken a bat to a hornets’ nest. “What happens now.”

“You’ll like this — we’re going to have to move to Reno to get divorced, because the laws are so lenient there. We found a nice place where we can have separate bedrooms until it's all finalized.”

“What about your job?”

“Turns out they were desperate for a trauma surgeon at the University of Nevada hospital. I set foot in the door and said Korea and they said, you’re hired.”

“When do you start?”

“Next week. I’m flying back in two days,” he said, regretfully, “because we have to move on Friday.”

“What about Erin?”

B.J. turned on his back and studied the ceiling as though it contained the secrets of the universe. “She doesn't exactly understand yet,” he said. “I don't know if she even knows we’re leaving Mill Valley.”

Hawkeye bit his lip and waited, listening.

“I’m trying to tell myself, she’ll be better off in the long run living with one of us at a time and not… being in the house where… sometimes it felt like there was no air.”

“No air?”

“Sometimes, it felt like we couldn’t even speak to each other,” he said. “Me and Peg. There was nothing to say. Or there was… there was so much that we couldn’t say that it was suffocating.”

“Beej, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.” He sighed. With an unbearable nervousness, his eyes met Hawkeye’s. “It was always going to happen. I think… I made up this story of how things were going to be, and then when it wasn’t like that… everything else that was made up just kind of collapsed.”

“I’m so — ”

“It’s not your fault,” B.J. said again. "I don’t know if — I actually don’t think it's anyone’s fault. It was like Peg and I saw everybody else building a house, so we built one too, but ours was made of cards.”

“Why do you think we make ourselves live like this,” Hawkeye asked.

“Who’s _we_?”

“I dunno. Americans. I tried it — I wouldn’t’ve gotten nearly as far as you did if I’d asked Carlye — or if she’d said yes.”

“I think when you can keep up appearances successfully, it’s a hell of a drug,” B.J. said.

“Too much can poison you.”

“Sometimes it feels so good you can forget it.” B.J. sucked his teeth. “Being… accepted.”

So that was what this was about. “Right,” Hawkeye said. “Your parents?”

“I don't know why I kept trying. I know who they are. My father's middle name might as well be Never Satisfied.”

Hawkeye watched him messily smear the dampness from his eyes. His own chest hurt so much that at first he started thinking through some standard diagnostics.

“I actually came here to ask if you want to come out to Nevada with me,” B.J. told him.

It felt like maybe a bucket of cold water being poured over his head or something. “What?”

B.J. knew him well enough to understand this was not exactly the question. “I’ve been deluding myself for a long time that what I had was enough,” he said, turning his body toward Hawkeye on the pillow again. “Can I tell you a story?”

“Anytime. Always.”

“When your dad called, last fall, to tell me you were in Reno,” B.J. said. “Peg got the phone. She said, it’s someone called Daniel Pierce for you. I thought he was calling to tell me you were dead. His voice sounded — but then he just said you were in Reno and that he didn’t think you were very well.”

“That’s a typically Pierceian way to put it.”

“I was so terrified and then I was so relieved. And that was the most of anything I felt since I said goodbye to you.”

“What about when you got home,” Hawkeye asked him. “What about your family.”

“Erin started crying whenever I got within arm’s reach of her, because she had no idea who I was, and Peg and I each acted like — well, that was the beginning of the no air thing. So I spent a lot of time sitting on the beach. And in the bar. Which was where I wrote a lot of great fiction, in the form of those letters to you.”

It was heartwrenching to hear even if it was unsurprising. “Beej,” Hawkeye tried, but then he didn't know what else to say.

“What I'm trying to say is, when you opened the door at the Sandman last year, everything that I thought was broken got fixed. I guess now I know what that means.”

“What does it mean?”

“I think I love you or something.” B.J. laughed. He had this particular way of laughing while he was crying. “I don’t know.”

Hawkeye's ears were ringing. “B.J., I think I destroyed your marriage.”

“No, that was me. I think I used you like a crowbar to wedge the bars enough to get out, and I’m sorry for that.”

“You really bent me out of shape, you know that?”

“Well it felt right when we made love, didn’t it?”

“It always feels right when you make love.”

“Not always,” said B.J., turning toward the ceiling.

Hawkeye turned onto his back too. He could feel his heartbeat shaking the bed or otherwise it was B.J.’s heartbeat. On a the ceiling a big brownish water stain roughly the shape of Australia was spreading inexorably across the stucco. From one of the neighboring rooms, a woman laughed.

“Well,” said B.J. nervously as they strained not to touch one another.

“You’re kidding me,” Hawkeye said. “You’ve just got to be kidding me. You don't know what you're saying.”

“Why would I kid you? I get sick when I’m apart from you.”

Hawkeye turned toward him on the pillow. He really looked like he meant it but the problem was he probably believed that he meant it… “I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

“How would you know? Are you in my dreams?”

“I dunno. You’re in mine. Am I dreaming now?”

“No. Otherwise we’re dreaming together. Can I kiss you?”

“I guess you wouldn't take no for an answer.”

“Because you wouldn’t give no as an answer. Can I?”

He had not entirely finished nodding before there were other lips on his lips. He closed his eyes. They went together to some other place and got lost there for a while.

“What was it you said,” Hawkeye asked, maybe the next hour or the next week or the next month when they pulled apart. “It felt right when we were making love?”

B.J. was cradling his face. His palms were rough and warm. “Something like that,” he said. “Refresh my memory?”

“Let me catch my breath. You know, that was some kiss. You really put your all into a kiss, you know that, mister?”

“It was a kind of Hail Mary at getting you to believe me. But if it didn’t work, I can think of a couple of other ways to prove it.”

“I just need one.”

“What’s that?”

“Can I tell you a story?”

“Anytime,” B.J. said, smiling. “Always.”

“Well, once upon a time there was a lonely doctor.”

“Is this just you?”

“No — he wasn’t as good looking and he had an awful sense of humor. And he wasn’t a doctor of medicine. He was a doctor of… physics or something. He worked at this terrible outpost at the end of the world, monitoring signals and things.”

“Signals?”

“Like cosmic rays and stuff.”

“Cosmic — ”

“It doesn’t really matter, Beej. You never heard of cosmic rays?”

“Is this a science fiction story?”

“Not necessarily — but anyway, he got to be convinced that time wasn’t moving, and that there were just a couple of different kinds of days that happened over and over again. The lonely doctor got to be convinced that, because it seemed like he was the only person who noticed such a phenomenon, it must have been happening to punish him specifically.”

“For what?”

“For never being able to say what he really meant or how he really felt to anyone. Especially not to the people who really mattered.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did he never say — ”

“ — because every time I ever fell in love before, it was a bad scene.”

B.J. studied him. “I thought this wasn’t about you,” he said.

“I lost the plot. The metaphor stopped working for me.”

“Well what do you mean, fell in love before?”

“That’s what I do. My heart is basically detachable.”

“Hawkeye, come on. What do you mean, before?”

Hawkeye sighed. “Do I need to tell you that I love you? I feel like it's the most obvious thing in the world.”

B.J. grinned. “Evidently not,” he said.

“I loved other people before but it wasn't — I never felt anything that was so heavy and so light at the same time. You’re very easy and very hard to love, Beej. I never knew a person so full of contradictions.”

“Speak for yourself,” said B.J. 

“I know I’m very hard to love,” Hawkeye said. “That’s what everybody always tells me.”

“When are you going to stop the self-abasement and let me love you? Because you’re also very easy.”

“Only for you.” Hawkeye let his lower lip and then his jaw and then the pulse in his neck be kissed. “You didn’t even buy me dinner.”

B.J. had had all the words he needed and was moving on to less academic pursuits, chief among which was Hawkeye’s belt buckle. “I’ll buy you breakfast,” he said.

“You did last time,” Hawkeye reminded him, not wanting to think about how they had sat unspeaking and untouching beside each other in the corner of the bar in the 24-hour diner on the edge of the city, yearning for scotch to put in the burnt-tasting coffee, petrified by improbable dread that everybody else in that establishment knew exactly who they were and what they had spent the previous evening doing. But now that he had thought of it he didn’t want to be alone with the memory. “In Columbus. Remember?”

He felt B.J. shiver, and then their eyes met, which as an experience could not be described in simile or metaphor. “I’ll buy you breakfast every day for the rest of your life,” B.J. said very seriously.

“That sounds like an irresponsible commitment made in the heat of passion,” Hawkeye told him.“That’s worse than ‘let's get married’ or ‘let's make a baby.’”

B.J.’s smile was sweet and slow. “Would you prefer one of those?”

“No. Breakfast is good. I’ll hold you to that.”

“I hope you do…”

It seemed impossible that this was really happening, and yet it was. It had never happened like this before. Of that at least he was certain. It had not even happened like this in dreams. It so transpired that time had brought them together and tested them again and again. The test was a real wringer, but when they woke up in the morning they would be free. Wouldn’t they? How could they not be free after this? But maybe he had thought that every time. Had he? He found he couldn’t remember now. He tried as hard as he could to put the truth, which was just love, into his every movement, every caress and every word, into his eyes, his hands, his mouth, all the rest of him, but he could feel B.J. doing the same thing, even though he wasn’t sure that B.J. knew, as he did, that this was the only way out.

He hoped that it worked. It had to work — it had to. What else would? But toward the end, once he had been very nearly disassembled, he understood that they were just two people in love. The rest of it be damned. That was all. That was enough.

—

“This again,” said B.J.

Hawkeye cracked one eye. B.J. was hovering above him, bracing a splayed palm against the ceiling of the bus. “This again,” Hawkeye agreed.

“You know what you’re going to do,” B.J. said. “Why play this game?”

Hawkeye covered his eyes with the soft crook of his elbow. Either his clothes smelled like blood or the bus smelled enough like blood that it had already seeped into everything about him. At least in this one it was cold. When this happened when it was hot out, it was pretty much unimaginably worse. “Will you let me indulge in morbid fantasy for one second?”

B.J. snorted. “You don’t actually want to be dead.”

“Of course I don’t. I want to go home.”

“Do you?”

From the front of the bus he heard the gravedigger’s distinctive wavery tone. “Uh, captains, sirs…”

“Give us a minute, buddy,” said B.J. “Hawk, you know you’re coming with me, so I don’t know why you don’t just — ”

“ — you’ve got it twisted, Beej,” Hawkeye interjected, propping himself up awkwardly on his elbows in the sling where customarily they slung the bodies that were broken beyond repair. Good company. “I thought I was supposed to be Virgil and you were supposed to be Dante.”

“Last time I checked, I’m supposed to be B.J. and you're supposed to be Hawkeye,” B.J. said. “And there’s wounded coming. That's all.”

“That's all?”

“That's all I wanted to say to you,” B.J. lied.

Sometimes he let the bus go halfway to Rosie’s but this time he didn’t. What was the point? Maybe next time he wouldn’t get on at all. He accepted the proffered hand up, and then he followed B.J. out into the bitter day.

—

He woke up. The birds were singing. There was another arm thrown across his chest and the blue dawn light was coming in onto the floor and the tangled blankets. He turned his face into the mess of hair on the pillow. “Where are we,” he managed. “When are we?”

The other body in the bed was glad to find his close at hand and snuffled into the join of his neck and shoulder. “Mmm,” said a voice in his ear. “Go back to sleep.”

He didn’t particularly want to, because it was the beginning more than it was the end, and he wanted to throw the door open and howl and run naked into the sea. But he could be still for another minute longer.

They went sinking back together into the same dream.

\---

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> nota bene: i have also not read the divine comedy. this is my second piece of many-thousand word mash fanfiction based on a tidbit from season four's "the interview." this piece very much came out of the spiritus mundi of everybody blogging about mash on tumblr so i can only thank you all very tenderly. you can find my mash tumbling (in every sense of the word) [here](https://s3e6springtime.tumblr.com/).


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